Why I am not married

I'm not married.  I have nothing against marriage, and I would like to get married some day, if a marriageable suitor who suits me should cross my path and want to eat hot dogs with me forever.  As part of the maturing process I feel must be necessary to get to a place where I can treat relationships seriously, I have compiled a list of reasons why I am single, and I will endeavor to work on these things in the future:

(1)  The only man I could ever love and feel safe with is Westley from The Princess Bride, and that's too bad for me, because a man like Westley is no more likely to exist than an R.O.U.S.  If you don't know who Westley is, or if you don't agree with me, stop reading my blog, because you're stupid. 

[D.B. Sweeney]

(2)  I say things like, "If you don't agree with me, you're stupid."  To wit: while being driven home from a first date that had gone really well, my date mispronounced the word "nuclear" and I demanded that he stop the car.  I yelled: "Stop the car.  STOP THE CAR!  I have to get out of the car!"  He said, "You're gonna walk home because I mispronounced a word?  That's kind of extreme."  I said, "I agree, but what you just said made my skin crawl.  I can't help it.  I liked you better when I didn't know you were one of those people who mispronounces the word 'nuclear.'"  He said, "How are you supposed  to pronounce it?"  So I told him.  And he said, "OK.  I didn't know.  But now I do."  I liked the way he diffused the situation.  I really thought that he'd let me roll out of the car and I'd never hear from him again, but it was masterful.  He was like a lion tamer.  He made me see that I was being ridiculous and that the problem could be solved with less drama and less jumping out of cars.  He did that a lot (I try to jump out of things a lot).  So we dated for a couple of years.  But he never could marry me.  How could he?  I would always be the girl who tried to jump out of his car.  You don't want people like that raising your kids.

(3)  Music is really important to me, and men are always wanting to listen to Jimmy Buffett and Jimi Hendrix and KISS.  I'm not going to say anything bad about Jimmy Buffett or Jimi Hendrix or KISS, but I don't want to listen to them.  I had a very healthy, 3-year relationship with a guy who willingly went to more than one Tori Amos concert with me.   And liked it.  And he wasn't even one of the gay ones.  That kind of lightening doesn't strike twice, so I kind of know I have it coming.  The next guy I date is going to be a total parrot head and there's nothing I can do about it.  I'm gonna have to iron palm tree shirts and eat at Margaritaville every single time I go on vacation for the rest of my life.  How can I get keyed up about marriage knowing that?

(4)  I just made it sound like I want a heterosexual man to go to Tori Amos concerts with me.

(5)  I don't cook.  It's not even that I can't cook.  I don't cook because I have no interest in it.  But I like to eat.  My last few boyfriends have enjoyed cooking, so it worked out nice for me, but my luck has to have run out there too.  Someone is going to expect more than a Pop Tart out of me one of these days, and I'm not going to go there willingly.  And certainly not before I threaten to jump off the roof.

(6)  I'm a divorce lawyer.  The "So, what to do you do?" portion of first dates is BRUTAL. I recently went on a date with a very nice guy who said something innocuous but nonetheless derogatory about lawyers within the first 5 minutes of our date.  He then told me that he was talking to a friend of his before the date, that he told her he was going out with a lawyer, and she told him not to say anything rude to me about lawyers.  But he still did it.  Guys ask me outright if I'm bitter or don't believe in marriage.  Actually, it's the opposite.  I take marriage very seriously.  I don't want to get married just so I can register for Corning-ware   I know that no one wants to get divorced.  But knowing what it entails, I really don't want to get divorced, and the only fool-proof method of avoiding divorce is to not get married in the first place.

(7)  I want to adopt.  I have a loose plan in my head of waiting until I'm in a position to adopt a child, and then I'll take the mean age of all my friends' kids and adopt a kid that age from the local foster pool. So you can imagine how strange people are going to think it is when all of a sudden I'm living with a 15-year-old black boy.

(8)  It's often quite scary to be a passenger in my car.  But the larger problem is, I don't care. I'm taking the bend by the Drake on Lake Shore Drive at 85 mph, and you're grasping at the dashboard thinking, "Why does she have to drive an aluminum Japanese coffin?  Why can't she at least have a Volvo?"

(9)  I have a tendency to start off as one person, and then partway through the year, I change into someone completely different.  I had two boyfriends in 2002.  The first one opined that I was too much of a party girl.  The other one said I didn't want to go out enough.  They were both right.  But, to be fair, the first guy gave me an eight ball of coke for my birthday, and the other guy moved his DVD player and his huge TV into my condo and signed up for Netflix  so it wasn't all my fault.

(10)  I blurt out things like "I got an eight ball of coke for my birthday!" I sort of know you're not supposed to say things like that out loud, but I do it anyway.  You weed out a large portion of the respectable/marriageable population when you have no governor between your brain and your mouth.

(11)  My wardrobe contains no tube tops. Guys only want to date girls who wear tube tops.

(12)  I have a problem where I think it's natural to write things in a blog that may or may not be true... and I don't care whether people know what things are true and what things aren't. Someone recently asked me if I really have a lot of STDs and do a lot of blow. "Why, yes! Yes I do! I was hoping you would notice that I wrote that in that blog of mine! And by the way, do you know any great guys you can set me up with?!"

(13)  I twirl a baton when I talk on the phone, and I am always hitting myself in the face with it, which causes me to swear and scream and abruptly hang up the phone, and people never know what's going on with me because I never call back. I once split my left nipple in half with my baton, and nothing looks more unsightly in a tube top than when your left boob is being held together with an ace bandage.

(14)  There is now, as you may have surmised, something wrong with my left nipple.

Oh, and that may or may not be true.

where r u?

What did we do before texting?  We talked to each other on the phone, that's what.  I was a year out of law school before I got a cell phone, and I was one of the first people I knew to have one.  It was as big as the Sun, and the battery lasted four minutes, and it cost $482 to make a phone call, but that's the way it was.

Before texting and cell phones, you could never find your friends in bars.  You had to walk around the PedMall, traipse all over the bar, not see your friends, and then try the next place.  Even well-laid plans to meet up were often foiled.  Before texting and cell phones, once you got in your car, you were incommunicado.  No one knew whether you were on your way or if you were trying to find a parking space or if you were still at home in the shower.  And before texting and cell phones, dating was normal.  Now that we have texting, dating is SO fucked up, I can't even talk about it.

While I didn't come late to cell phones, I did come late to texting.  I thought it was something that only teenagers did, so I felt sheepish about doing it.  Creepy even.  Plus, until a year ago, I had a cell phone with a regular number pad, and texting on that thing was a pain.  First of all, it took too long to tap out the letters.  Second, I cannot write in text speak.  It makes my eyes bleed.  I physcially cannot use the characters "u" or "r" or "2" to mean "you" or "are" or "to".  I just can't do it.  I even have to use sentence case and proper punctuation.  So, while you can say, "where r u", I have to write, "Where are you?"  And while you can say, "gr8 2 c u :) 2mrw?", I have to write, "I really enjoyed seeing you, Jim. I hope we'll get together again soon!  Maybe tomorrow?"  Even with a full qwerty keyboard on my Android phone, it takes me a long time to draft, edit, proof, and finally send my texts, so I'm just no good at texting.

Being bad at texting can mess up opportunities. It's not helpful when someone booty texts you and you're trying to think of a good response and while you're in the middle of tapping out something really witty and fun, he texts, "why u taking so long?'

[me being bad at texting

also, as per usual, sweaty]

I make unjustified judgments about people based on their grammar and spelling.  When someone misspells a word, or says "you and I" because they think it makes them sound more intelligent, even though it should be "you and me" because it's the object of a preposition, I get upset. I feel disappointed. I can't help it. I know that's my cross to bear, and no one else is with me, so I'm the one who has to change.  But it isn't coming easily for me.  The purposeful shortening of words and not following the rules of grammar, even in the interest of ease and speed, disheartens me and turns everything upside down.  You're writing in ebonics, but you've got an advanced degree.  It doesn't compute.

The first person to write like this was Prince. Check out the lyrics to Pop Life. Then Sinead O'Connor started doing it. But now it's gone to an extreme.  Text speak is widely accepted, and people write this way in emails now too.  They even say things like "LOL" and "WTF".  There are more syllables in "WTF" than there are in "what the fuck"  It isn't saving you any time, so why are you saying it that way?  Are you afraid to swear?  Are you more embarrassed about swearing than you are about how you can't read and write?  And really, are you LOL?  Because I'm standing right in front of you, and you clearly are not LOL.  Don't lie to me right in my face.

Another problem I've noticed about texting is that, whereas in some instances it saves time and gives helpful information in real time, texting is, most of the time, a waste of time.  It can take hours of texting back and forth to commicate what could have been said in a 30-second telephone conversation.  This is because, after you send a text, you have no control over how long it takes the recipient of the text to reply to you with another text.  And it's stupid, because you are both obviously holding your phones in your hands. It would be so much faster to dial the person's number, say what you need to say, and then hang up.

But people don't like to say things out loud.  People prefer to text, because texting is passive, and what I mean by that is: Texting is for pussies.  When you send someone a text, it's the equivalent of saying to them, "I'm afraid to call you, but if I were to call you, I'd hope to get your voice mail so I could leave a message and not actually have to talk to you.  I'd prefer to make it so you have to call me back, and when you call me back, I probably won't pick up the phone, because I said what I wanted to say in the message I left on your voice mail."

So while I do text, even though I have to do it as if I am writing an old-timey letter, I also have friends who don't text at all, and it's annoying.  It's like having a friend who doesn't have a telephone, and when I want to talk to that friend, I have to ride my horse and cart over to his house and ring the bell.  But whereas you may find yourself heckling your friends who don't text, how annoying is it when your parents get in on the action?   No one wants a text from her mother.  Not hardly ever.

Another thing about texting is, there are no rules.  There's no etiquette at all.  First, there is no universal agreement about what ends a discreet text interaction. In the olden days, and I believe this is widely in practice even today, when a telephone conversation had reached its conclusion, one person would say, "Bye." And then the other person would say, "Bye." And then you would both hang up.  You gave the cues.  Fin.  But with texting, sometimes you write, "Bye," but a lot of times you don't. You never really know when a text exchange is over. This is confusing and sometimes upsetting. If we're in the middle of a furious texting session, going quickly back and forth, and I ask you a question expecting you to respond right back, but instead I don't hear from you until four days later, well, what in the hell is that? That's the wonderful world of texting! And it's totally acceptable. It's so acceptable that when that happens, you're not even allowed to complain. Because no one owes you anything when you send a text. When you text someone, you're at their mercy. Maybe they'll find your text worthy of a response. Maybe they won't. If I call you and I say, "I'd really like to see you," it would be highly weird if you hung up on me. But if I text you, "I'd really like to see you," I might not ever hear from you again.

Second, there are no hours of operation. Remember when we just had telephones with rotary dials? There was no call waiting, and answering machines hadn't been invented. I actually lived in a world like this. In those days, the rule was, you don't call people at their home before 10 a.m. or after 9 p.m. If the phone ever rang after 11 p.m., your heart would start to race. The only thing on the other end of that phone call was, "Grandma is dead." But with texting, you can text anyone any old time. Except there's one rule, and it only applies to single people. If you are single, the only people who text you after midnight are people who want to have sex with you. For example, I get the following text at 2 a.m.: "Hey". That translates roughly to "Wanna come over and fuck?" But I can't tell my mother about this rule. So my mom might text me at midnight and say: "Hi, honey. I'm going to Sam's Club tomorrow. Let me know if you need anything :)" When I hear that little ding that tells me I have a text, my body starts to quiver... "Yippee!! I'm gonna do some fucking tonight! I wonder with who?!" But no. It's my mother, asking if I need a 48-pack of batteries and some toilet paper.

In conclusion, there are lots of things I don't like about texting and what it's done to our relationships and our world.  However, there is one thing I really love about texting, and that is the moment after you hear that "ding" that tells you you have a text.  It is the most exciting sound in the world and it gives you the most delicious feeling.  Anything could be at the other end of that little noise.  The butterflies in your stomach get all stirred up.  You could be in the middle of solving world peace and not able to get right to your phone, but you would be thinking, "YAY! I have a text!  I wonder who it could be!"  Opening a text is like opening a present, and the only thing more exciting than that is...

a love letter.

... booting up the scanner right now.

I ate someone's cat once